Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 46

Some artists can’t catch a break, even with an agent.

25. The Dead House – Billy O’Callaghan

The Dead House doesn’t tell the story from the perspective of the person enduring the blunt force of the haunting once the seance and Ouija board are put away, it tells you how that looks from the perspective of someone who it seems will be more haunted later since they got away after said seance. It’s a bit of an odd choice to set the story with someone who isn’t experiencing the main part of the story, but it wasn’t a totally frustrating read despite this.

Maggie, an artist who was beaten very badly by her boyfriend and thankfully managed to not go back after getting out of the hospital, ends up finding a cottage in an isolated area of Ireland where she could paint, if she wasn’t so busy being haunted by another controlling man (ghost) after her housewarming weekend and drifting into madness. Eventually, her agent does go and check on her, finds the madness and the creepy story and the disheveled cottage, and is convinced to leave, but must go back, with another of the seance participants, and finds the cottage burnt and almost gets pulled into the sea by ghosts who will now follow him and his family. Pleasant.

Salem does not think any of that sounds pleasant.

I’m never surprised when something goes wrong with a commune.

31. Generation Loss – Elizabeth Hand

Cass Neary is a photographer who can smell damage because she has so much damage it’s not possible to smell anything else. She’s photographed enough dead persons to know that death has a smell and it doesn’t leave. Her nickname, “Scary Neary” is one of my favorite things about the book and the other is how detailed she is about the particulars of photography – she’s got a camera that has to be loaded in the dark, she knows a lot about all the smells of the chemicals and how they would do x with this manipulation and x with that. It’s pretty great to read, considering that most mystery novels involve police protagonists, a jaded, cranked out photographer with transcendent nerdery is an entertaining protagonist to follow instead.

This is the first in the series of four thus far and it’s bleak as hell and once Cass gets to Maine it gets even worse. She’s been pulled from her general squalor by her friend and drug dealer Phil to interview a photographer no one’s heard from for ages who lives on an island in Maine and clearly does not want to talk to anyone ever again, especially about her photographs. She even thinks Cass ripped her off in Cass’ one published book of photography. She is not a happy camper. So, because that’s not working and she can’t easily leave the island, Cass wanders around and discovers some extremely creepy photos and some bizarre doings related to the former commune on the island (suprise, suprise) and ends up figuring out what happens to people who go missing in that area of Maine, and quite a lot of turtles. An abundance of turtles. These turtles do not have a good owner.

Belvedere was born in my house, so he had a good owner if I do say so myself, and a turtle stuffed animal to cuddle with too.

“She missed ‘myriad’ on the vocab test two weeks ago.”

19. A Solitude of Wolverines – Alice Henderson

Apparently this is the start of a series about a wildlife biologist who also has martial arts skills (Jeet Kune Do), used to get dropped into the middle of nowhere and commanded to do survival tests by her mother, can repair a 1930s snow plane in about 10 minutes while being chased by criminals running an endangered species hunting ring, and who also has the essential Beastmaster skills of somehow communicating to locked up and starved endangered animals that she is not a threat, unlike all those other humans they know. Well, except the mountain lion. And she also uses the word myriad in both ways it can be used every 10 pages up until a point where it finally shows up only sparingly. In my opinion, overusing myriad is a crime in and of itself. It’s a word used to make you sound smart and when put in the mouth of a cipher around writing I would generally describe as “juvenile,” it’s just distracting. She has all these skills, but, what they do is make her blank. A particular set of skills instead of a full person. She demonstrates how manipulated by plot she is when she states the title early on in the book like it’s some wistful dream phrase. Ew.

Oh, she also has this boyfriend, who she’s on a break from but still interested in, and he moved from being interested in civil rights law to corporate law and shiny, expensive things, and the author wants us to believe that someone who made this choice, named Brad mind you, would actually show up in the wilderness to get his girlfriend, who he has always known prefers the wild to the city, to come back to him…and he tries to get her a job at the zoo that’s not staffing the gift shop or keeper. I think he would have just cheated on her and stayed in Boston, happy to hand his problem girlfriend over to wolverines without much effort and move on with someone easier who will idolize him and his expensive car. No effort and he gets to keep all his money – that makes way more sense. Or he could’ve just been left out entirely instead of giving the main character more ways she needed to get defensive about loving wildlife and activism related to it.

I finished this, but I thought about not finishing it because I didn’t want to see the word myriad again. I sort of regret finishing it for myriad reasons, amongst them the weird ass “suddenly we know the thoughts of her stalker” method of setting up a series. Look over there, it’s another plot with a stalker! I will cross my fingers that someone reveals that the stalker is actually a biologically manipulated wolverine who can type.

Snuffy’s sister animal of the wilderness is the musk ox, which thankfully was not a part of this mishmash mess of a story.

Not the usual kind of procrastination

28. Dead Lake – Darcy Coates

Sam is an artist, not a survivalist, not someone possessing the skills to outwit a stalker in the forest, not inherently possessed of the knowledge she might need to survive being stalked by killer while she’s trying to paint something – anything – good enough for her upcoming exhibition. Besides it making sense for someone who primarily wants to be a painter to not be super great at preparing for wilderness living in a cabin with no electricity, I enjoyed the tension that wasn’t contained in the part where she’s getting stalked by the living and haunted by the recently deceased. When you have an art deadline, it can very much become impossible to make anything worthwhile to your own standards, so her countdown of “I have this many days to paint” was super relatable for me as it tends to be how I spend most vacation time from work. And considering how short this book is, it could have been left in the dust…like in so many other horror stories where maybe the only art thing would be turpentine on fire or stabbing a paint brush through a killer’s eyeball.

Otherwise, it is very satisfying to see loose ends tied up in a shortster as well. Dead Lake, generally, is a very easy read about a haunt and a killer and an artist stuck in between them with a deadline and the ability to keep a fire going.

As a frequent subject of my paintings, Ozma saw me battling my “I have a show! I have to get this done and scanned!” deadlines several times with the very same paint brushes in the background of this photo.

“Welcome, fool. You have come of your own free will to the appointed place. The game is over. “

59. The House of Small Shadows – Adam Nevill

It is clear that Walter Potter’s taxidermy had a heavy influence on the proceedings of this book once it gets going a bit. If you aren’t familiar, Walter Potter stuffed quite a few domestic animals, including guinea pigs, and set them up doing things, like kittens playing croquet, guinea pigs playing musical instruments at a table, and rabbits going to school, in anthropomorphic dioramas. They’re all a little bit off feeling (guinea pigs do not stuff well, that is just a fact from every taxidermy guinea pig I’ve seen that I kind of didn’t want to see), even if you’re interested in taxidermy. Personally, I’ve always been a little scared of it, hence my museum scene in the final book of my squirrelpocalypse trilogy, Night of the Squirrels. Oh, Potter stuffed squirrels too, unsurprisingly.

The other influential tradition I saw in this book quite clearly is that whole insular village situation. If someone isn’t local, they get to be very uncomfortable. If you’re just stopping by, or, say investigating the disappearance of a young girl which is looking more and more like a folk rite sacrifice, well, it won’t end well. For the main character in this book it’s a bit odd, because she’s not local per se, but she finds the bizarreness of the village and the taxidermy and the puppets (AHH!) more familiar and ingratiating as she goes along. Apparently all she needed to overcome being bullied out of her job and losing her relationship to that bully (what a bitch) was to immerse herself in taxidermy dioramas in a creepy isolated place – who would’ve guessed?

Mortemer felt safe from puppets and a future in taxidermy in my household; and not just because he slept with an eye open.

I’ve always preferred Texas chili.

71. Bad Chili – Joe R. Lansdale

Leonard and Raul broke up and Hap finally found another girlfriend. And then highjinks ensue involving chili, videos, dead dudes, a biker gang, and terrible nicknames. Another earthy, but vicious, entry in the Hap and Leonard series means more of one of the best literary friendships committed to print. I really wish the TV series of this hadn’t been cancelled, even if the Bad Chili season would have been well disturbing.

Horace and Danger Crumples have just seen a videotape they can’t make heads or tails of. Not shocking, they have no tails and they’re always going to be too young to understand VHS.

Speaking of the alternate spelling, sanitarium, Master of Puppets came out 35 years ago.

17. The Sanatorium – Sarah Pearse

A detective on leave with a panic attack problem for past and more present reasons is stuck in a luxury hotel that used to be a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. She and her boyfriend were invited there by her manipulative brother who has eczema and I have to say, I have that and I rarely see it mentioned in books, so that was an interesting new thing in this debut novel. Also an interesting thing in this debut novel, a protagonist with panic attacks and a mystery based in female rage over mistreatment.

I saw some reviews that called the protagonist, Elin the currently on leave detective, “weak,” and I do not agree. It takes a lot of strength to weather panic attacks and still function. A lot. She definitely could have started therapy related to the childhood part of her trauma that keeps coming up sooner, but, lots of people avoid therapy. Especially in professions where one is supposed to project strength and ignore the reality that strength is not perfection and working on oneself is stronger than avoiding working on oneself. Even if she’s avoiding working on herself, she’s still not weak.

She’s also illustrating a truth of investigation – it’s better with a team. She could solve all the murders and make all the perfect decisions for investigating in a place she has no history with, or she could be more human and screw up a bit, make some rash decisions because she has no one she trusts to bounce them off of and she’s not doing that. If she had a dour but smart assistant, that would have helped on several levels, but she just has her “it’s cool” boyfriend and a quickly paced plot.

All this said, the like tagged on very very very last chapter was totally unnecessary. I’ve seen this “And she’s got a stalker so we can start a series!” epilogue thing – this exact stalking a lady thing – twice in books published in the past two years and that is twice too many as far as I am concerned.

Guinea pigs, as prey animals, are prone to hypervigilance and responses that are quite panicked. However, if you let them investigate as a team, they’re not as scared and more likely to make odd choices like trying to nibble the coffee table.

“Satan has become an embarrassment to our progressive views.”

1. The Last Days of Jack Sparks – Jason Arnopp

Under most circumstances, I don’t really like when social media invades novels. It isn’t that fun for me to read about posts getting likes or tweets or what have you, reading about it is proof of how much of a time suck that can be and it doesn’t have the suspense of the phone call without caller ID, etc. It just sort of kills action for me, not unlike if you have dinner with someone who can’t put their phone down. However, The Last Days of Jack Sparks makes it work head-spinningly well. This is a playful and actually scary book and it moves right along.

Jack Sparks makes the grave mistake of thinking his egotistical famous self is bulletproof enough to laugh during an exorcism. That was a bad idea. He’s also writing the story you’re reading, which could be terribly irritating, but this is the kind of book where a reprehensible character is one you want to follow along on his descent into hell finding out about what the supernatural can do to him regardless.

Thaddeus knows better than to laugh at an exorcism, he’s seen parts of that movie, parts of the second one, and parts of the third one too.

 

Detective Exposition, Detective Plot Point

117. Blind Goddess – Anne Holt

I am hoping that the problem with this novel is just that its sense of style is lost in translation somehow. It was so flat to me that I was surprised Anne Holt is supposed to be one of the greats of Norwegian crime fiction. She has tons of actual relevant life experience, but I’ve honestly read police reports with more gripping style and those are supposed to be on the dry and objective side even when discussing super disturbing things. It was also soooo slow to read. So slow I almost gave up.

The characters were really uninspiring to me and I had a hard time understanding how this was the beginning of a series where Hanne Wilhelmsen is the lead because I can barely recall her doing much in the story. She was present, but, we didn’t seem to be following her investigating or her as a person anywhere near as much as the sad lawyer, Karen, who is married but was starting an affair with a member of the police who I also got the impression was a lawyer and not investigating exactly, it was confusing. Karen also wasn’t normally doing that kind of lawyering but she got picked off a list by a bloody, anonymous arrestee who of course had the key to some larger conspiracy. And then Karen also provided the location for an actually interesting fiery conclusion, but how she got there was being sad about affair-having and clearly longing for a cottage and a cardigan. I felt a lot of beige coming through the pages.

Finny looks over the side of the bed for clues as to how murder, drugs, and flaming vehicles could be so boring.

“I know wind when I see it.”

49. Witch House – Evangeline Walton

This book originally came out in 1945 from Arkham House, the Wisconsin publisher of weird and otherworldly stuff and things…like What Made Stevie Crye? and perhaps other books that make sense? I’m not entirely sure yet. In Witch House, there’s a ghost escaping a painting ala Vigo in Ghostbusters II (too scary), poltergeist-style activity (Betty-Ann to Carol Anne), and connections to Rasputin (there was a cat that really was gone), and yet there was also the endless overuse of one adjective…in its old context, and I got distracted from the plot because characters of several ages sounded too similar. We’re essentially trapped with a family who must’ve all been homeschooled by the same person with no access to synonyms. The young Betty-Ann did not have “shooketh” to describe her feelings of being haunted, but she certainly had “strange,” and if all else fails, “indescribable.” The old editing trick of underlining all the repetitive words or phrases in red would have been very illuminating, but perhaps that was done and it didn’t take. Many adjectives for the otherworldly or unusual existed in the 1940s. You have a Tibetan knife? How unexpected. There’s a warlock in your family tree? Uncanny. You want to run away from your ancestral island so you don’t have to marry your cousin – what a peculiar thing to do (not really). There’s a giant black hare chasing you? That is very bizarre. And also awesome, my copy is the 1991 edition with said hare on the cover. Clearly, there was a lot going on to be distracted from, including the plight of poor Betty-Ann and the lack of ethics in the psychiatrist (and studier of the arcane, this book had potential to get real netherworldly), who is apparently falling for his patient’s mother, the same mother who had a crush on said psychiatrist without ever meeting him because she heard about him as a child. Isn’t that…a little…weird?

Merricat herself, was strange and unusual. And if she wants to hop out of one of the paintings I did of her, I’m all for it.